Sunday, August 20, 2017

A Plan for Economic Growth

Noah Smith has a 13-point plan to help the economy grow in ways that help ordinary people. Here are his planks, with snippets explaining some of them; each is explained more fully at the link:

1. Universal health care.

2. Pro-employment policies. (The government should use corporate-tax incentives to encourage companies to hire and retain workers during recessions. For those who can’t find any job in the private sector, the government should provide jobs directly.)
3. Improve infrastructure. (But the U.S.’s peculiarly high infrastructure costs need to be brought way down.)
4. Encourage urban density.
5. Wealth taxation. (e.g., property taxes and estate taxes)
6. Skilled immigration.
7. Wage subsidies.

8: Stronger antitrust enforcement. (creeping market concentration is raising consumer prices and reducing the share of income that goes to workers.)

An interesting list. It has a bit of a dreamy quality, as in that line about we need to spend more on infrastructure but first we need to figure out why it costs so much. But at least there are ideas out there about things that might help with our economic problems.

3 comments:

There sure are a lot of things that the US spends way more on than most other western countries do. Healthcare, defense, infrastructure, housing, utilities, child care, et cetera, et cetera...

Other countries care a lot more about being efficient and making the best use of their resources possible. But we've traditionally gone with a "brute force" approach to problem solving, simply overwhelming obstacles by throwing huge amounts of resources at them. We've historically worked harder, not smarter.

We would literally rather go to war overseas to secure access to more oil, than just stop consuming so much oil in the first place. Drive smaller cars? Use more public transit? Build infrastructure that makes it possible to get by in life without even owning a car? Hah! This is America! Get out of here with that "Socialist" garbage!

I was afraid we wouldn't hear from you regarding this topic, and would have to just assume your positions on each of the listed point based only on what we know of the sort of people who go around calling other people "degenerate" inbetween advocating ethnic cleansing.

So nice of you to once again take the time weigh in on behalf of eugenicists everywhere. You are a credit to your cause.